Manchester United finished in 15th place last season. In 2023-24, they finished eighth. They briefly jumped up to third in 2022-23, but they finished sixth the previous season. United have had a net-zero goal differential or worse in three of the past four seasons. Mediocrity is the new normal.
So, when they fired their manager Ruben Amorim earlier this month — without a replacement lined up — where were they sitting in the table? It must’ve been 16th, right? Or, maybe 12th? A tiny bit of progress, but not enough progress for the fourth-richest club in the world, right? When Manchester United fired Ruben Amorim, they were tied for fifth place.
If that seems foolish, then wait until you hear what one of the only clubs richer than Manchester United did last week. Real Madrid fired their manager, Xabi Alonso, after a cup-final loss to Barcelona. Real Madrid also didn’t have a replacement lined up, but that’s one of those bone-deep, generational rivalries like Michigan-Ohio State where a loss might even outweigh a championship.
Except, this wasn’t the Champions League final or even the Copa Del Rey. No, it was the Spanish Super Cup: the fifth-most important competition either team will play in this season, at best, and a tournament whose final rounds are now played in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — in 80-plus-degree weather, in the middle of the season, while Spain is just entering winter.
But maybe this was the last straw. Real Madrid must be struggling in the Champions League, right? No, they’re on pace to get a first-round bye — better than they did last year. OK, what about in LaLiga? They’re just four points back of first, and their expected-goal differential, the most predictive metric for future success, is the best in Spain.
So, two of the biggest clubs in the world are on the verge of successful seasons. Madrid could still win the Champions League and LaLiga after not coming close to doing either last season, while United are in the middle of a wide-open race for the Champions League places after finishing three spots clear of relegation just a year ago. And they both just fired their managers without knowing who would replace them.
Both clubs will wait until the summer to figure that out, as they made clear when they announced their new coaches — Alvaro Arbeloa at Madrid and Michael Carrick at United — will have the roles only through the end of the season. Both clubs have a ton to play for. And they (A) fired their very young and very expensive managers, and (B) didn’t bother finding a guy they could trust to coach the team for more than a couple of months.
I’m not sure they’re doing it on purpose, but … doesn’t it seem as if the clubs in Madrid and Manchester are telling us that managers aren’t that important?
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Why managers matter — and why they don’t
There’s a robust corner of academia without a real home: the study of coaching effects. Successfully quantifying the value of a soccer coach won’t win the respect of your peers who are zeroing in on the protein pathways that lead to Alzheimer’s or doing anthropological field work in Colombia to better understand the meaning of the coca leaf. But if you tell people in sports about the findings, you will get laughed out of the locker room and told to go back to the library.
That’s because most studies have found that coaches don’t have much of an effect. This is so obviously wrong — and so obviously right, at the same time.
It’s wrong because, well, we’ve seen Jurgen Klopp transform the way Liverpool played and performed, we’ve seen Pep Guardiola turn Manchester City‘s sovereign wealth into long-lasting possession-based dominance, and we all saw what happened when Jurgen Klinsmann managed the U.S. men’s national team or Diego Maradona took the reins with Argentina. Coaches can inspire certain players, focus on certain strategies and change the way a team plays.
You don’t need to be an expert or an elite athlete to understand this. If you played sports at any point, you’ll remember some coaches who helped you become a better player and others who made you want to renounce the premise of competition and join a monastery.
At the same time, though, managers matter less than we think for a couple of ultimately obvious reasons. The first is clear if you listen to any manager talk about managing a soccer team: They don’t play. “If your players are better than your opponents,” legendary player and manager Johan Cruyff once said, “90% of the time, you will win.”
1:52
How Carrick’s ‘hands-on coaching’ could succeed at Man United
Craig Burley discusses Michael Carrick’s upcoming games managing Manchester United and why he got the role.
One way I like to think about the difference: If the average fan managed France at the World Cup and Klopp managed the USMNT, then France would still be heavy favorites to win. But if the average fan played center forward for France and Kylian Mbappé played for the USMNT, then the USMNT would probably be favored — or at least it’d be close.
Which brings us to the second reason coaches matter less than we think: The pool of potentially effective managers is way bigger than the pool of potentially effective players.
If you’re a truly awful coach who can’t identify your team’s best players and then asks them to do things on the field that decrease their chances of winning, then you won’t get a chance to manage in the Champions League. And so, what most studies tend to reveal is that the majority of top-level managers, over a long timeframe, don’t show any quantifiable difference between each other. The tendencies of certain coaches might blend particularly well with certain players at a certain time — such as Arne Slot with Liverpool last season — but most coaches can’t maintain the added value as the variables at every team change, year after year.
In a study published at last year’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, George Ferridge found what I think of as the condensed version of managerial analytics: Almost everyone is clustered around the average, and then, there are a couple of outliers in both directions. Klopp and Guardiola, in particular, graded out as significantly better than other coaches.
“This indicates that while many managers have little to no correlation with player performance, a number of managers are associated with either largely positive or largely negative deviations in those performances,” Ferridge wrote. “This is in keeping with findings from other papers on the differential impact of top-level impact but the overall substitutability of managers in the field.”
A 2010 study titled “The performance of football club managers: skill or luck?” came to similar findings. The study controlled a team’s results for wages, transfer spend and injuries, and then awarded any under- or over-performance to the manager. What’s most interesting, though, is which coach the study identified as the one who consistently delivered above-average results.
It’s who Manchester United and Real Madrid have hired to oversee the long-term futures of their squads: No Manager.
“Of all 60 managers, it is interesting that on this measure, having no permanent manager at all is the ninth best,” the authors of the 2010 study wrote.
The rationale and the risk of the caretaker coach
So, if having no manager ranks better in many cases than having a manager, what does that mean? The study concluded: “This may reflect the fact that players are likely to put in extra effort in the short term under a caretaker manager as their future at the club and livelihood may be at stake.”
It would be too facetious for even me to suggest that Manchester United and Real Madrid are (A) aware of this study, and (B) misinterpreting the conclusions so poorly that they think not having a permanent coach will actually boost results. But I think it says something about the state of modern soccer that two of the biggest clubs in the world, both in the middle of seasons where desirable objectives are still achievable, have given the keys to short-term coaches who are former players with no experience coaching anywhere near a Champions League level.
Arbeloa has never been a professional manager, while Carrick has never managed in the top flight of any country.
1:53
Why Real Madrid’s defeat to Albacete is a ‘failure’ for Arbeloa
Ale Moreno talks about Real Madrid’s 3-2 defeat in the Copa del Rey against Albacete in Alvaro Arbeloa’s first game.
Now, the factors that led both clubs here are a little different. Under Jim Ratcliffe’s partial ownership, United are trying to become a more modern organization where various people are involved in building the roster, and United fired Ruben Amorim after he publicly said that he didn’t want to deal with that. Madrid, meanwhile, fired Xabi Alonso for almost opposite reasons: they’re still a player-and-president-run club, and Alonso tried (and failed) to implement a modern tactical approach that demanded more of his star players than they were willing to give.
Whatever the reasons, though, there is a kind of logic to both decisions — if we give both clubs the benefit of the doubt that the managerial situations were untenable. Granted, that’s a very big “if” given the general dysfunction both clubs tend to cultivate, but if there are only a couple of coaches who will make your team better, then you might as well take your time in trying to find one of the guys who might do that. And the chances that one of those guys is available in the middle of a season is quite low — especially with a number of successful managers who will become available after the World Cup ends this summer.
So, rather than panicking and making another expensive long-term bet on top of the expensive decision you just made in firing your coach, isn’t it better to bring in a low-cost option to finish the season? Especially if the baseline assumption should be that most coaches don’t drive results to any meaningful degree.
After all, we’ve seen plenty of interim managers be successful — both in older academic literature and more recent real-life. In 2012, Chelsea won the Champions League with Roberto Di Matteo as their interim manager. In December 2019, Bayern Munich fired Niko Kovac and named Hansi Flick as their caretaker. At the end of the season, they won the Champions League. Gareth Southgate literally became a knight because of his work as England manager, a role he was initially given on an interim basis. Perhaps most famously: Mario Zagallo won the 1970 World Cup with Brazil after being appointed only temporarily, just a couple of months before the tournament started.
Of course, the downside is that your interim choice is one of those coaches who makes his teams worse. Given you’re selecting from a by-definition less-accomplished pool of people who would be willing to sign up for a short-term gig, the chances of hiring a bad coach is higher than normal. Sometimes, say, Tottenham replaces Antonio Conte with interim manager Cristian Stellini, and then he gets fired and replaced by interim manager Ryan Mason — and both caretakers oversee a significant decline in results.
And so, that is the risk and the paradox of the situations in Manchester and Madrid, and with managerial roles more broadly. Hiring a coach is an expensive decision that could transform your club. But what’s more likely is that it won’t move the needle, in one way or the other.
The most likely outcome for United and Madrid from here is that both continue playing at about the same level that wasn’t good enough to keep them from firing the past two guys they hired.
